A Grieving Sister Learns Her Brother May Yet Live In This Excerpt From The Warm Hands of Ghosts
Katherine Arden is best known for her Winternight trilogy, a lush and gleaming historical fantasy series based on the myths of medieval Russia. (If you haven’t read The Bear and the Nightingale yet, please fix your life immediately.) And though her latest novel, The Warm Hands of Ghosts, is very different in terms of subject matter, the emotional longing, lyrical prose, and fully realized worldbuilding that feels like the best sort of fairytale will be very familiar to fans of Arden’s previous works.
Set in early twentieth-century Halifax and on the battlefields of Belgium in the final year of World War I, The Warm Hands of Ghosts is one part historical novel, one part supernatural fantasy, and one part meditation on grief. A story of war and loss that delicately explores the long-tail effects of trauma, it follows Laura Ivan, a 24-year-old combat nurse who is sent home to Nova Scotia after being seriously wounded. But when she’s told that her younger brother Freddie, serving at the front in Belgium, is missing and presumed dead, she volunteers to return to Europe, aiming to work at a private hospital while she tries to find answers about what happened to him—and whether he might still be alive.
An alternating timeline follows Freddie’s story, as awakens underground, trapped in an overturned German pillbox with a wounded enemy soldier. As he and the German Hans Winter bond while facing down what is their presumed death, a connection that lingers after they escape. But distraught at the thought of returning to the fighting, they both take refuge at a mysterious hotel, where they meet a fiddler with seemingly supernatural abilities. As Laura inches closer to the truth about her brother’s disappearance, both she and Freddie will have to confront the wounds the war has left on their family—and decide what their future will look like.
Here’s how the publisher describes the story.
January 1918. Laura Iven was a revered field nurse until she was wounded and discharged from the medical corps, leaving behind a brother still fighting in Flanders. Now home in Halifax, Canada, she receives word of Freddie’s death in combat, along with his personal effects—but something doesn’t make sense. Determined to uncover the truth, Laura returns to Belgium as a volunteer at a private hospital. Soon after arriving, she hears whispers about haunted trenches, and a strange hotelier whose wine gives soldiers the gift of oblivion. Could Freddie have escaped the battlefield, only to fall prey to something—or someone—else?
November 1917. Freddie Iven awakens after an explosion to find himself trapped in an overturned pillbox with a wounded enemy soldier, a German by the name of Hans Winter. Against all odds, the two men form an alliance and succeed in clawing their way out. Unable to bear the thought of returning to the killing fields, especially on opposite sides, they take refuge with a mysterious man who seems to have the power to make the hellscape of the trenches disappear.
As shells rain down on Flanders, and ghosts move among those yet living, Laura’s and Freddie’s deepest traumas are reawakened. Now they must decide whether their world is worth salvaging—or better left behind entirely.
The Warm Hands of Ghosts won’t hit shelves on Tuesday, February 13, but we’ve got an exclusive look at the story to help tide you over till then, in which a seance reveals
Laura was hauled to her feet. She found herself standing before a finely dressed, old-fashioned person, half a head shorter than her, perhaps ten years older, and enchantingly beautiful. Outlandish hair, the color of fool’s gold, framed neat cheekbones, and a mouth like a rosebud. She was wearing black.
Laura got her balance and collected her wits. “Thank you, ma’am. Such a soft carpet. I’m glad I had the occasion to learn it firsthand.”
“Oh, don’t thank me,” said the woman. “Are you sure you’re all right? I mean, when I heard footsteps, I just— I was in there, and Miss Parkey was— Oh, I felt such a thrill, as though she was really speaking to the beyond, and then you were walking, so I had to run out and see. I am clumsy. I’m so sorry. I just— I thought it might be Jimmy.”